|
COPYRIGHT 2005 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
Willa Cather's novel O Pioneers! bridges the gap between gender and heroism. In this regional novel, Cather captures the essence of the heroic pioneer, the noble American spirit taming the West, in a female character. She creates a woman hero who has qualities and actions that make her break the parameters of gender roles. Alexandra Bergson is a female hero who shifts the reader's perceptions of heroism, greatness, and nobility. She is a woman who embodies all the attributes admired in the finest of male characters in the American literary canon when faced with trials only a woman could confront. As a hero of the West, Alexandra breaks the concept of the untamed West and the woman's role in it. She is an intense, indomitable woman who is determined to expand her horizon and to have her own way. She triumphs alone over intractable surroundings and adversity, shaping a world of order and coherence and achieving for herself identity, nobility, and even fame.
**********
The settlement of the American frontier has provided one of the richest themes in the history of the United States. This saga of people fulfilling what was widely believed to be America's manifest destiny has been told and retold in many varied forms. Upon closely examining the history of the American frontier, however, we discover that male-oriented interpretations of the frontier still prevail. Unfortunately, most historians of the frontier have been oblivious to the presence of women in frontier society. When Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his now-famous address "The Significance of American History" to the American Historical Association in 1893, he clearly was talking about a male frontier. Turner stated:
The wilderness masters the colonist.... It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin ... he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion (Turner 1962: 4).
Nearly three decades later, another historian, George F. Parker, offered a similar definition of frontier settlers to the Mississippi Valley Historical Association when he declared:
I define the American pioneer as the man who ... crossed the mountains from the thin line of Atlantic settlement.... To me, this man reflects the character of the most effective single human movement in history (Parker 1922: 3).
Male writers who drew upon the frontier and its women for their themes contributed to female stereotyping. One might reasonably say that in much of Western frontier literature, heroism and gender share a very specific association. For example, American literature and its critics tend to practice a type of "male hero worship". We as readers tend to elevate what is heroic, and when the hero is male, we venerate heroic male attributes and actions. Hero, as used to describe characters in the American nineteenth-century canon, is a gender-specific role based on connotations and assumptions. It is an assumed notion, and perhaps one which is taken for granted, that the self, the American self, is male, so the hero is male and attributes of the hero are also deemed male virtues. The hero of the American canon is defined as a person of great merit, passionate independence, and determined self-motivation. He is round, multi-dimensional, and dignified. He is a far-reaching, forward-looking adventurer who pushed his way into the frontier of the nation, exploring the plains, the sea, and the cities. His range of action is not limited because he is as big as America (and even the world) itself. Whitman's words in Salut Au Monde! proclaim the overpowering limitlessness of the American man: "My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination/around the whole earth ... Toward you all in America's name,/ I raise the perpetual hand, I make the signal" (1982: 296-297). The sphere for the man is the sphere of the globe; he is outside the home and shall remain so by choice. The country, the continent, the Earth are "the haunts and homes of men" according to the speaker in Salut Au Monde! (1982: 297).
The literary hero is a significant part of the myth of America: a land of opportunity for the courageous few who look toward the future. In The American Adam, Lewis points out that American literature has offered a new hero for the new world:
The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources (Lewis: 1955: 5).
We can assuredly assume that the hero is the Whitman-persona in Song of Myself who proclaims: "I too am not a bit tamed ... I too am untranslatable,/I sound the barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" (1982: 87). Gross in The heroic ideal in American literature (1971) suggests that the American hero is known to us by many names: the American Adam, Prometheus, the Rebel-Victim, Faust, the Emersonian hero, the Black hero, the Disenchanted hero, and the Quixotic hero. Hawkeye of The Deerslayer, Ishmael of Moby Dick, and Huck Finn of Huckleberry Finn are only a small number of American heroes who are comprised of the myth of the American landscape. They not only proclaim their heroic existence in American literature, but they also grasp our collective imagination because they are heroes of courage, bravery, and integrity.
Although the term heroine is defined much like hero (the principal female or male character in a novel, poem, or dramatic presentation), it does not have the same connotations as the term hero. The heroine, who by definition should be equal to the hero, is not. Indeed, she is excluded from the questing, striving and conquering that both...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
